8/03/2005 @ 6:00AM

Web Search Hits The Streets

A few weeks ago, Harvard senior Patricia Raciti found herself in an unfamiliar area of Boston, wondering how to make it back to the bus stop where she usually catches a ride home from work. All she knew was the name of the hotel across the street from the bus stop. So she whipped out her phone, tapped in the hotel’s name and sent it as a text message to Google. Within seconds the search engine came back with the hotel’s location.

Like thousands of others, Raciti has become a daily Google
texter, ever since she discovered the mobile search service on Google’s Web site earlier this month. “My phone doesn’t have Internet, so this is the answer,” she says.

Mobile search is poised to become the next big offshoot of the profitable pool of Internet search. The numbers are there: The U.S. has 180 million cell phone users compared to 125 million PCs. The only hitch is that U.S. cell phone users are still relatively uncomfortable with using their phone for anything but making calls, largely because the phone’s small screens make searching the Web difficult, at least compared with big handhelds such as the Palm Treo and Research in Motion‘s
BlackBerry.

But SMS, or short messaging service, could change that. SMS was developed in the early ’90s and allows users to send messages up to 160 characters using mobile gadgets. “Texting” in a search request with SMS is a snap to learn. SMS already has a heavy following in Asia and Western Europe. Europeans alone exchanged 239 billion such messages last year, up from 100 billion in 2001. Brits and Continentals use SMS to locate late-night taxis, check their bank balances and receive alerts about new tour dates for their favorite bands.

Americans exchanged only 37 billion messages last year, according to the Yankee Group. But the numbers are rising.
Verizon Wireless
handled 3.6 billion text messages in the first quarter of 2005, up 40% from the same period in 2004, when Verizon began tracking SMS volume.

The carriers are counting on search to keep those numbers climbing. Google has been offering mobile access to its invaluable directories in the U.S. and the U.K. since late last year. (It won’t disclose the number of search requests to date.) It has been joined in the U.S. by its desktop rival
Yahoo!
and a Silicon Valley startup called 4Info. Texters can send any of these three a query in spasms of up to 160 characters, and receive sports scores, stock quotes, definitions, phone numbers and addresses. Each mobile search engine is reachable through a five-digit short code: 46645 for Google, 92466 for Yahoo! and 44636 for 4Info.

Wireless carriers pocket roughly a nickel on each exchange, and customers benefit from quick directory look-ups at a fraction of the cost of calling 411.

The ones not making money on it yet are the search engines. “We really don’t generate revenue right now,” says 4Info Chief Executive Officer Pankaj Shah, who founded the company last year with $8 million in funding from venture firms Draper Fisher Jurvetson and U.S. Venture Partners. His plan is eventually to sell ringtones or wallpaper and to channel relevant interactive ads that generate transaction fees, as in movie ticket purchases. “Yahoo! and Google getting into this area validates everything we’ve done,” he says.

4Info built its search engine specifically to look for content that mobile users most often request, as well as drink recipes, fantasy sports stats and horoscopes. Shah shied away from Google’s “everything you always wanted to know about everything” service. “If you want to know where King Tut’s tomb is, we don’t do that,” says Shah. “We’re not burdened by Internet search.”

Seven Tips For Better SMS Searching

Follow the form. All search engines will accept a ticker symbol for quotes and “weather 90210″ for forecasts, but each has its own code system. Check out google.com, 4Info.net, and yahoo.com for guidelines.

Not all services are created equal. We recommend using Yahoo! SMS for stock quotes, 4Info for movie times and drink recipes and Google for settling trivia bets. All three handle weather decently, but who can ever really get it right?

Use your zip code rather than city name for the best results.

Only Yahoo! and 4Info let you reply for more listings. Use them instead of Google if what you’re looking for needs refining.

Practice makes perfect. The more familiar you are, the better. You can even hone your search skills by using desktop demos on your PC.

Memorize letters, not numbers. Google’s is GOOGL, or 46645. YAHOO and 4INFO are what they are.

When all else fails, dial 411. It’s only 3 digits.

Maybe he’s on to something. When asked recently for the address of a trendy downtown Manhattan club called Butter, both 4Info and Yahoo! located it on the first try. But Google sent back results better suited to baking. Its top three hits, texted back in rapid succession, were Kings Farm Butter and Egg Co., food wholesaler Wils Harry and Co. and a restaurant named Butter deep in the heart of Brooklyn. Not exactly a hot spot.

Yahoo! and 4Info also turned up some less helpful results, including a sandwich shop specializing in peanut butter, but offered the generous option to reply for more listings in case their first three guesses were off. Google insists people will opt for breadth of search. For now, only Google lets you send a text message with the 12-digit UPC code of an item in a store and get a reply with better prices on its Froogle shopping service. It can also handle many straightforward questions composed in short-hand, such as “population India” or “ingredients margarita.”

Google’s director of wireless products, Deep Nishar, says he used the service just last week when he and a roomful of engineers could not recall the author of Tarzan (answer: Egdar Rice Burroughs). “It gives people mobile access to the facts and figures they want. It really ties in nicely with our mission to organize and make the world’s information more accessible,” he says.

In a bid to capture more of the mostly young SMS crowd Google in May acquired Dodgeball.com. This service, available in 22 cities, allows youngsters to spin a social network and text-message updates of their location to friends within a 10-block radius.